Eureka!

In this week’s magazine, there is an interesting collection of sidebars called “Imagined Inventions.” The writer Jonathan Nolan, for example, imagines an emoji keyboard on your smartphone that, instead of creating emoticons, could produce the perfect facial reaction to any situation—a date, a power meeting, whatever—on your very own “smartface.” The novelist Gary Shteyngart imagines an amped-up version of the Google driverless car that would drive you safely from your bedroom to your favorite bar and back again. Since the most inventive and imaginative people I know are cartoonists, I thought this would be a good challenge for them, as well.

Liam Walsh writes, “Maybe I just wasn’t trained properly, but I’ve never known quite how to trim my nails without them going everywhere. I always wished there were nail clippers with a box around them to contain flying clippings, making for easy disposal. Eat your heart out, Da Vinci.”

No comment was needed for Bob Eckstein’s or Carolita Johnson’s ideas:

The cartoonist Alex Gregory felt that his idea might be better left undrawn. He writes: “I would mandate that all guns must be shaped and colored to resemble penises, so that the paranoid right-wingers who have hijacked our democracy are forced to choose between clinging to their guns or their homophobia. Unfortunately, I don’t think a cartoon of such an invention is necessarily something your readers want to see.”

Joe Dator imagined something eminently practical and, I hope, for his sake, patentable. It’s brilliant. He remarked, “Whenever I use a drugstore umbrella that opens by pushing a button, I wonder, ‘Where’s the other button?’ ” As far as I know, nowhere but in this cartoon. Really, somebody should do this. Are you listening Hammacher Schlemmer?

Finally, just in time for Obamacare to kick in, the cartoonist and M.D. Ben Schwartz suggested how to improve health care starting with the health carer himself.

Bob Mankoff was the cartoon editor of The New Yorker from 1997 to 2017.